Chapter 14: One Room

RAYA

I had three days of hearing prep spread across the kitchen table, color-coded and increasingly incomprehensible, when my phone buzzed against a stack of depositions I hadn't finished reading.

It was Nadia calling, not Sophie.

"It's postponed," she said, without preamble. "Victor's team requested a continuance. Judge granted two weeks."

I sat with that for a second, oddly deflated, like a fight I'd been bracing for had just evaporated mid-swing.

"Why would he ask for more time?"

"Building a stronger case. Or stalling. With Victor, it's usually both." Nadia didn't sound worried, which somehow made it worse. "Mr. Locke wants to see you before he leaves. He's in the study."

I found Xavier already dressed for travel, the kind of understated, expensive clothes that meant somewhere important, not somewhere social.

"You're going somewhere," I said.

"Singapore. A trade summit I can't reschedule." He didn't look up from the documents he was signing. "Pack for four days."

"I wasn't aware I was invited."

"You are now." He finally looked at me. "Every major investor I need for the next fiscal quarter is going to be in that room, and half of them have read the same headlines you have this month. I need you there. Visibly. Deliberately there."

"So this is the dinner performance again," I said. "Just with better scenery."

"You're my wife, attending an event with me. Draw whatever conclusion makes you feel better about it." Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. "The jet leaves in three hours."

"Three hours. For an international flight."

"That's usually how long it takes to fuel a plane, yes."

"Sophie's already been briefed. Your team's covered while you're gone." He didn't look up from the documents. "Anything else you're worried about, tell me now while there's still time to fix it."

I didn't have anything else, which annoyed me more than having something would have.

The jet was smaller than I expected from the outside and enormous once I was actually standing inside it, cream leather, low lighting, a level of quiet that felt engineered rather than accidental. A flight attendant took my coat without being asked and asked, with genuine warmth, whether I preferred still or sparkling, like the question itself was a small kindness rather than a service.

"You didn't tell me it would be like this," I said, settling into a seat that was easily twice the size of anything I'd sat in on a commercial flight.

Xavier didn't look up from his phone. "Comfort's not indulgence if it doesn't cost you anything extra to provide it."

"Convenient philosophy for a billionaire."

"It's not philosophy. It's arithmetic."

Somewhere over the Pacific, his phone rang, and he answered it without apology, switching into a version of himself I hadn't fully seen before, clipped, precise, terrifyingly fast with numbers I couldn't have followed even if I'd tried. I gathered, from the fragments, that someone on the other end had tried to renegotiate a shipping contract behind his back, and by the time he hung up, four minutes later, that person no longer had a contract at all.

"Remind me never to renegotiate anything behind your back," I said.

"Wise." He didn't look up from his laptop.

A flight attendant appeared with a blanket I hadn't asked for and draped it over my legs before I'd fully registered I was cold. I glanced at Xavier, who hadn't looked up, hadn't said a word to anyone, and yet somehow the blanket had arrived at exactly the moment I needed it.

"Did you tell her to do that?"

"I told her you run cold on long flights." He finally glanced up. "You mentioned it once. In the car."

I didn't remember mentioning it. I filed that away with all the other small, unsettling proofs that he listened far more carefully than he let on, and said nothing, because I didn't entirely trust what my voice would do with it.

Somewhere around hour nine, he closed the laptop, poured two glasses of something amber, and handed one across without asking if I wanted it.

"You're better at this than you let on," he said, nodding at the notes I'd been making on his contract review, red pen, margins full of questions he hadn't asked me to answer.

"I built Sinclair Gems from a single workshop into a real company. People just liked assuming the logo was the extent of my involvement."

"Their mistake." He took the page back, scanning my notes again like he was reconsidering something. "I don't make it twice."

By the time we landed, it was already dark, the kind of humid, glittering dark that only existed in cities built too close to the equator. A car was waiting on the tarmac. An immigration officer met us at the base of the stairs instead of making us wait in a terminal line, stamped two passports in under a minute, and wished Xavier a pleasant stay like he did this every week, which, I realized, he probably did.

The hotel lobby was marble and orchids and hushed, expensive silence. Xavier didn't so much walk into a room as absorb it, and I found myself, not for the first time, wondering what it must feel like to move through the world assuming every door was already open before you reached it.

The woman at the front desk looked apologetic before she even opened her mouth.

"Mr. Locke, I'm so sorry. There's been a mix-up with the reservation. The summit's fully booked out the hotel, and the request for a second room came in after every remaining suite had already been assigned." She glanced between us, visibly bracing. "We do have your original reservation confirmed, the Ambassador Suite, one of our finest. I should mention it's configured with a single master bedroom."

My stomach dropped somewhere unhelpful.

"A single bedroom," I said.

"Just the one, I'm afraid. The bed is quite generous, if that helps at all." She offered a small, apologetic smile, the kind reserved for situations she clearly had no control over.

Xavier considered it for exactly a second, unbothered, like this was a logistics problem and nothing more.

"Fine by me."

I stared at him. "You're not even going to pretend to be uncomfortable about this?"

"Would it help if I did?"

"Unless you'd like me to find you a different hotel at midnight, in a city where I don't control the room inventory." He picked up the key card off the counter before I could argue with the receptionist, who by now looked profoundly relieved not to be part of this conversation anymore.

"Your call, Raya."